Thursday, July 09, 2009

Republicans Defend Honduran Coup & Hope For More In Latin America While Fanatisizing About One In America

Anyway the Honduran coup has been condemned globally but US conservatives, Neocons & Republicans are adamant that the Coup in Honduras was somehow legal since it actually was a defense of Democratic Institutions & Liberty. They like to remember the good old days when America only backed the most repressive right wing dictatorships in Latin America.

They remember fondly the days when leftists & liberals & dissidents in Latin American countries were disappeared or their dead bodies tossed onto city dumps when Nuns were raped & priest like Oscar Romero could be tortured or assassinated with impunity. When the Free Press was shut down for decades & the media was tightly controlled by the dictatorship & the military.

They feel bad now that George W. Bush didn't go as far as he should have & shut down the evil pernicious liberal press & media & tossed those who opposed the Iraq War into detention camps or just had them disappeared.

These days they are arguing that Obama is destroying America & that eventually some sort of drastic action will be needed to replace Obama by a more cooperative Democrat maybe Biden or Hillary. I don't know if they would go that far but this is the fantasy which they keep expressing on Fox News & elsewhere in the US on a daily basis.

Anyway back to Honduras & the Coup In The Name Of Liberty.

GOP Senators Speak Up for Democracy in Honduras-July 7, 2009

Senators Jim DeMint (R-SC), Mel Martinez (R-Florida), John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma) hold a press conference to support the people of Honduras against the actions of Manuel Zelaya who sought to defy the Honduras constitution and is aligned with anti-democratic leaders Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Raul Castro of Cuba and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua.





These Republicans claim they are pro-democratic which seems like a bit of hypocrisy given the way the Republican Party & their Republican President George W. Bush ran things. Bush & Cheney extended the powers of the executive branch far beyond what the US Constitution allows.

So where were these Pro-Democratic Republicans when George W. Bush was ignoring the US Constitution & the Bill Of Rights .
Where were they when Bush & Cheney used the Department of Justice to pursue their agenda. Where were they when Bush insisted that whatever he does is legal because he is the president & the decider. Where were they when Bush & Cheney authorized the use of torture against US law & international agreements. Bush & Cheney had little use for the Rule of Law. They believed they could change the laws to suit their needs &they bullied the Congress & Senate to go along with them .Anyone opposed to their plans was called unAmerican, accused of giving aid & comfort to the enemy or were chastised for not supporting the troops etc.

Are Republicans unaware of America's history in Latin America in which the American CIA overthrew democratically elected governments in Latin America or ousted governments which did not serve America's corporate interests. Of course they know this but they never saw anything wrong with interfering in a sovereign nations internal affairs. Would they feel the same way if some other nation were to interfere with America's internal affairs.


So do these Republicans believe that if the US President is over-reaching, is contravening the Constitution & the Separation of Powers & the laws of the land or the Rule of Law then the US Congress or Senate & the military have the right to oust the president by force & not just by impeachment or some other legal means. If this is so then the Democrats & others would have been justified in ousting George W. Bush. So why didn't the Democrats & the Military or other parts of the government take out President Bush & his cabal of thugs. One reason is that the Republicans claimed that such a move would have been unconstitutional.

Now they change their tune when it comes to Latin American governments who happen to be moving to the left. If they were moving to the extreme right the Republicans would be defending those governments as they did in the 1950s, 60's 70's & 80's . Even if those governments were terrorizing a large segment of their citizenry & imprisoning & torturing or disappearing any who dared criticized these governments. These governments of Chile , Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Argentina , Venezuela etc. kept order through the use of "Death Squads" who were trained or advised by US military personnel & the CIA in order to help these governments crush all opposition & to imprison or murder dissidents.

In El Salvador for instance the "Death Squads" & military killed tens of thousands of their fellow country men in the name of Freedom & Democracy & the Free Market Place & other elitist nonsense. Meanwhile the Contras referred to as Freedom Fighters by the US government which also financed them through the Drugs for Guns deals with the cooperation of the state of Iran . These Contras were in fact thugs many of them paid mercenaries & not freedom loving volunteers as they were portrayed by the US government & the gutless US media. Having been well armed the Contras terrorized the citizens of Nicaragua sometimes massacred whole villages on the border or within Nicaragua, they also raped tortured in the name of Freedom & Capitalism.

Kevin Coleman in his article about the Honduran Coup argues that this coup is clearly class based as the upper classes felt threatened by Zelaya's progressive policies to make government more transparent & to help out those living below the poverty level even though they had jobs. Zelaya believed that all Hondurans should be treated with dignity & fairness. Not something American Neocons & conservatives could bring themselves to believe in since they believe that those who rise to the top deserve their wealth & power & the rest are just not fortunate enough or do not have what it takes to be successful . Those who are not successful have only themselves to blame & they should not be helped out through government programs in any manner. That's just the luck of the draw- say the Neocons & conservatives- altruism & compassion & empathy are in their view useless emotions encouraged by the poor & their socialist friends.

A Coup is Not a Coup. A Not-Coup is a Coup.By Kevin Coleman July 07, 2009 "History News Network" via Information Clearing House -


... On Monday June 29, in a replay of the military raids on the Jesuit radio station El Progreso of the 1960s and 1970s (the Jesuits committed the grave error of walking with the poor rather than serving as mere instruments of the rich), the Jesuits' progressive radio broadcasts were abruptly pulled off the air at four in the morning. On Sunday evening at 6 PM, just an hour after the coup government’s curfew began, a military contingent broke into Radio Progreso’s headquarters. With fury and guns pointed, they shouted, “We’ve come to close down this piece of shit!” ...Radio Progreso is the only radio station on the north coast that has remained critical of both the right and left wings of Honduras’s ruling Liberal Party. This military operation to shut down the radio station was not accompanied by any written orders, only the threat of violence. ...

...A class-based coup cannot be openly declared as such and must instead be articulated through existing political ideologies that allow the group seizing power to represent what they are actually doing as something other than what it is. So as the business, industrial, and news media of the country summoned the repressive power of the military to create the political conditions to rule by the traditional economic and political ideologies that have left the majority of Hondurans in dire poverty, they justified subverting the legal and democratic system as a defense of democracy.

...Zelaya gradually began to confront the main power blocks in the country. It was then that he gave Roberto Micheletti Bain, who was at the time the President of the Honduran Congress, an ultimatum: either sign a law widening the scope of the citizenry’s participation in the affairs of its government or he would not take office the next day. Micheletti signed the Law of Citizen Power (La Ley de Poder Ciudadano; the government website explaining this law has been shutdown by Micheletti’s interim government). In 2006, Zelaya pushed through the Law of Transparency, giving the public unprecedented access to the information produced by and for the Honduran government. In January 2009, he increased the minimum wage from $132 per month to $290 per month, infuriating the elite and small business owners. Shortly after, he joined ALBA. Spearheaded by Hugo Chávez, ALBA is an economic development initiative that is intended as a counterweight to U.S.-backed development initiatives in the region


...With regard to the radical disjunction between international perspectives (“It was a coup and that is inherently undemocratic”) and local perspectives (“It was not a coup but the rescuing of democracy”), we can look to the role that the Honduran media played in Zelaya’s overthrow. Over the past seven months, Honduras’s ultra-conservative and reactionary media has served as an echo chamber in which the elite has been able to repeatedly use a recycled version of Cold War anti-communism to convince much of the Honduran population that Zelaya was driving the country toward, to quote La Prensa, “a system of totalitarian socialism.”


(Compare the media propaganda against Zelaya with that of the US media especially Fox News & Talk Radio featuring Michael Savage, Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck , Rush Limbaugh Laura Ingraham etc. in their attacks on President Obama inwhich they lie & misrepresent Obama's policies & public statements & they fear monger about Obama's Secret Agenda of a socialist dictatorship - it all sounds errily familiar GORD.)

.
..As Hondurans have been bombarded by a coherent media assault that began many months ago, they internalized the constantly repeated notion that seeking the public’s input through a non-binding referendum was in fact a veiled attempt to consolidate power in the executive branch and to force them into adopting Hugo Chávez’s socialism of the twenty-first century. The tightening of media control since the coup has only reinforced the notion within Honduras that the military’s sacking of the elected president “was not a coup.”

...This attempt to represent order, purity, and to portray themselves as the “true” Honduran defenders of the constitution is similar to the anti-Chávez rallies in Venezuela. In contrast, Zelaya’s supporters are a raucous bunch, eclectically dressed, and ethnically diverse. They are creatively getting around the media’s attempt to ignore them and render them invisible to the rest of the nation and the world. If they can’t get their messages across through radio, television, or print media, they will spray paint them on the walls. If the interim government says that there is no repression and everything is normal, they will bring the cartridges of bullets and tear gas that the military has used against them to the next demonstration.

...This coup has just upped the ante for all involved. It was Zelaya’s unexpected moves to the left, without the strong support of any particular social and political base, that helped to unify the Honduran right against him. But while less than a week ago, Zelaya had no social base to speak of, the coup has outraged even those who thought his policies and erratic behavior to be ridiculous. For them, this is no longer about the political left or right and much less about Mel Zelaya. Instead, they see the military’s illegal sacking of the president as an assault on their democratic system.

And geopolitically, the stakes are equally high. If the Honduran right gets away with this military coup, what is to stop the Salvadoran right from sacking Mauricio Funes? And if the international community allows the military to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Honduras, why shouldn’t the Nicaraguan right feel emboldened enough to overthrow Daniel Ortega?


The Republican Party is accused by Senator Specter of moving too far to the right & have allowed the Far Right to have far too much influence in the party.

Seanator Jim De Mint says the Republican party stands for freedom- free markets & freedom from government .
CNN Rick Sanchez To GOP Senator Jim DeMint "What The Hell Does That Mean"

CNN's Rick Sanchez & GOP Senator Jim DeMint Talk Specter's Switch - Sanchez Slam DeMint for "People want Freedom" Comment - "What The Hell Does That Mean" - April 28, 2009



Karl Rove acts as if he & the Bush Regime did not control the US media Fox News & others became part of the Bush Regime's Propaganda machine for eight years & they are still defending Bush .

Now the Republicans are complaining that the media is according to them getting unprecedented access to the White House. The Republicans claim that they should be given equal time whenever Obama is in the media dealing with policies. As Cenk Uygur points out the Republicans were against the fairness doctrine when Bush was in power but are now arguing in favor of it when the Democrats & Obama are in power.

Hannity & Rove Turn Up the Hypocrisy to 11-The Young Turks



and so it goes,
GORD.

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